by John Sladek
Luke dropped a few coins on his saucer. ‘There, you old fraud. I’ve seen you taking up collections in every storefront church around here.’
‘Bless you, sir, it’s only for the clothes. Against the terrible winter.’
Roderick took off the red stocking-cap and handed it over. ‘You need this more than I do. In fact I don’t need it at all.’
‘Bless you, bless you …’ The old man salaamed away.
Luke was impressed. ‘You’re outa work and you give away your cap. By God I like that. To hell with getting a drink, I’m gonna get you a job. I work at this little factory, see, and they always need extra men.’
He led the way outside against the blustering wind and wet sleet, to an alley between two warehouses. Roderick followed cautiously to a rickety fire escape, then all the way up to the roof. There Luke knocked on an iron door which, to Roderick’s surprise, opened at once. A fat yawning woman let them in. To Luke she said, ‘Boss wants to see you. Right now.’ She looked at Roderick. ‘Who’s this?’
‘This is my old pal Rickwood. I’m just gonna show him around, he might accept the offer of a job here.’
‘Ha! Better see the Boss first.’
First, however, Luke showed Roderick around. It was a peculiar factory, with hardly a machine in sight. They went down open stairs into the middle of the place, a lot of trestle tables where people sat making things. There seemed to be a lot of different products being turned out here.
One old man with a gallon of wine at his elbow was painting a rustic scene on a diagonal slice of birch log: a lake at sunset, with a moose on the shore and a canoe gliding across, beneath the words Souvenir of Lake Kerkabon. The painter completed his work, flipped the wooden plaque over, and stamped on its back MADE IN KOREA.
Next to him a woman with an eyepatch was flattening out aluminium cans and hammering them on a mould to make them into ashtrays shaped like horseshoes. These two were stamped MADE IN KOREA.
Next to her was a man fishing green felt letters very quickly from a bag and sewing them on a grey baseball shirt. His little hand-cranked sewing machine chattered away and in less than a minute he had spelled out SHAMEROCKS. As a final touch, he sewed a label into the neck of the shirt (Made in Korea). Others were assembling and testing digital watches, again with the puzzling label, while still others were painting portraits of the President on decorative meat platters, labelled again.
‘Why is everything “Made in Korea”?’ Roderick asked.
‘It makes people realize they’re getting a bargain, the cheapest item available. It is the cheapest, too. Nobody in Korea can get labour as cheap as it is right here, off Skid Row. Even automation costs more than us. Want a job here?’
‘Sure, why not?’
‘Okay, just let me find the Boss.’ Luke went off to the far end of the room, to a little cubicle made of cardboard cartons. There was a constant sound coming from that cubicle, a high-pitched electric hum.
In a moment Luke came back. ‘You can’t win ’em all,’ he said cheerfully.
‘No job for me?’
‘Not only that; they fired me too. I guess I was expecting it, but – oh hell, Rickwood, let’s go get that drink after all.’
Outside, the cold wind and sleet continued to batter at pedestrians. The gutters were filling up with water, floating cigarette filters and popsicle sticks, pizza boxes and foil from chewing gum, a non-returnable bottle with no message and a used condom floating like a pale jellyfish, bandaids, plastic coathangers, an old TV Guide. Roderick thought he saw the floating body of a Golden Retriever puppy, wrapped in sodden toilet paper, but he couldn’t be sure.
At the Tik Tok Club there were police cars and an ambulance, and a large crowd.
‘All right, everybody back,’ said a cop, though in fact no one was pressing forward to look at the figure being rolled out of the bar on a stretcher.
‘… and these two guys just shoot him when he walks in the door,’ said someone. ‘Figure that, an old wino like that, I mean who would waste a bullet? Figure that, these two guys just …’
‘Everybody back.’ The cop bent and picked up the red stocking-cap which had fallen, and put it back on the stretcher.
VII
Luke ordered two scotches. ‘I know why they nailed him. It’s because I gave him 39 cents. They wanted to teach me a lesson.’
‘What lesson?’
‘I didn’t ask permission first. Jesus, Rickwood, don’t you understand? It’s “Captain May I” around here all the time; you gotta ask permission to scratch your ass. I mean I gotta ask permission. So they rubbed him out, just to remind me.’
‘Remind you? Luke, I think this all sounds –’
‘Remind me who’s captain, of course. Who gives the orders them – and who takes the orders – me. I see you aren’t drinking. On duty are you?’
‘No I’m not on duty, but listen, Luke, who are they?’
‘As if you didn’t know!’ Luke finished both drinks and ordered two more. ‘Okay, maybe you don’t work for them. I guess maybe I’m a little upset here, losing my job and then seeing that poor old fart lying dead – I mean it hasn’t been all that good a day.’
‘You said you were expecting to be fired,’ Roderick reminded him.
‘Yes. Yes. The Boss said there were too many mistakes in the work. He’s right, he’s right. See, we were working on car seat covers, you know the ones? Imitation leopard skin. There was this big team of us, painting on the spots. And everything was going along okay until I went and changed religions.’
‘You mean to the Church of Christ Symmetrical?’
‘Naw, before that. Like I said, I get a new religion every week or so. No, this time it was the Disciples of the Four Gopsels.’
‘The Four Gospels?’
‘No, the Four Gopsels. Deliberate mistake there, see.’ Luke finished two more drinks. ‘The whole basis of this religion is that nobody’s perfect, everybody makes mistakes. Kind of an Islamic idea, I think. To err is human, and not to err is divine. So if you
make something perfect, you’re only mocking God. so in everything you do, you have to make one deliberate mistake.’
‘I see where this is leading,’ said Roderick. ‘You made mistakes on the seat covers?’
‘That wouldn’t have been so bad. All I’d do was maybe leave off a spot, or do it in the wrong colour, or sometimes do it in a funny shape like the ace of clubs or something. But see painting leopard spots is boring work, so you get to talking with the people you work with, great bunch of guys and gals, I – well, I converted them. They all got born again as Disciples of the Four Gopsels too. So then each of them had to make a deliberate mistake. And by the time twenty-seven people do this, the seat covers start to look kinda funny, you know? That’s why the Boss fired me.’
‘Maybe that was his deliberate mistake,’ said Roderick.
‘Rickwood, you’re a card. I haven’t had a good laugh since I left the Corps.’
‘The Corps?’
Luke laughed again. ‘Maybe you’re not spying on me.’ He took a gold pin from his pocket and laid it on the bar. ‘Like, you wouldn’t know what that is, would you?’
Roderick looked at the pin. It showed a circle nested in a crescent, and a star with three lines coming down from it. ‘Some Masonic lodge? Turkish Army?’
‘The Astronaut Corps, pal. I was an astronaut. In fact I was the hundred-and-forty-seventh man on the moon. I was the hundred-and-eighty-first to walk in space, and the two-hundred-and-seventeenth to say “The Earth sure looks beautiful from up here.” Ah, those were the days, those were the days. Except –’
‘Except?’
‘Except they weren’t.’ Luke ordered more scotch. ‘Maybe I should start at the beginning. See, I always wanted to go to the moon. When I was a kid I read space comics and built model rockets and everything. Then I went into the Air Force, dropped a few bombs, had a few laughs, and ended up married and with three yelling kids in North Dakota. Here, I’ll sh
ow you pictures of my kids, look at this. No not that one, that’s a bomb pattern, here we are: Ronny and Vonny and little Lonny. Cute, huh? Of course they aren’t yelling in the picture.
‘Anyway they told me I could qualify as an astronaut, only first I had to get a PhD. They figured they couldn’t have guys walking in space and saying how the Earth sure looks without PhDs. So I went to college, only right away I could see I wasn’t going to make it. So I decided to cheat. I had a lot going for me: I looked bright, I was rich and my father was a Senator. So I bought exam answers and faked experiments, and hired a research assistant to write my doctoral dissertation for me – I couldn’t even pronounce the title. Defending it was no problem, either: I had Dad put a little Federal research grant muscle on the college, and they managed to come up with a friendly committee and a prepared list of questions and answers. I got my PhD and I became an astronaut. You see, dreams can come true.’
Roderick shook his head. ‘What I don’t see is why it mattered so much. What’s so great about space?’
‘Let’s have another drink and I’ll tell you. Barkeep?’
Roderick saw a familiar face at the end of the bar. Or was it familiar? Just some man with oily black hair, tinted glasses, and a tweed overcoat. He was talking to a pretty, doll-like little woman in a black fur coat – they both looked a little overdressed for Skid Row – telling her jokes, evidently. Every now and then she’d let out a little squeak of laughter and say, ‘Oh Felix, you are the limit! The limit!’
Luke was saying, ‘Why did I want to be an astronaut? I used to ask myself that, you know. But then when I’d get home after a hard day faking lab experiments, and the kids would be yelling and the wife would refuse to iron my socks and make a big scene about it – then you know, I realized why I liked space. It’s because you’re alone out there. No one wants a bedtime story. No one wants you to drop off clothes at the cleaners on your way home. Oh don’t get me wrong, I love my wife. I love my kids. I love my dog and my television set and all my neighbours and fellow countrymen and everybody else, but I still like to be alone, once in a while. In space. You know like in that poem, “The world’s a fine and private place”.’
Roderick said, ‘I thought it was the grave that was a fine and private place.’
‘Okay never mind that. The point is, I got into space finally, and instead of being alone, it was just the opposite. Two guys in the damned space shuttle with you, and Mission Control in there too – I mean right inside your damned suit. You eat a ham sandwich, this voice in your ear says, “Nice going, Luke. Hope you enjoy the ham sandwich, because your blood sugar level can use it.” You take a piss and they know exactly how much, what’s in it, the pH and albumin level, everything. You take a walk on the damned moon, they check your heart rate and tell you you’re lookin’ good, just gotta remind you they’re watching every move.’
‘I think I see what you mean.’
Luke laughed. ‘They see it, too. They see everything I ever did mean and ever will mean! Well, you get back and they have to debrief you, that means a lot more talk about how well they’ve been watching you. Then come the awards and shaking hands with the President and banquets and more awards and parades and crowds, crowds everywhere, even if you get a minute alone in your hotel room if you turn on TV there you are, eating that ham sandwich again, the world is not a fine and private place at all.’
Roderick studied the oddly familiar stranger again. He had a long jaw, and the skin of his face seemed dull in the glaring lights of the Tik Tok Club – powdered? The only really familiar feature of that long, empty face was the pair of tinted glasses. Who did they remind him of? No one.
‘That’s not the worst, the publicity’s not the worst. The worst is when it’s over,’ said Luke. ‘Because then you go home and it seems good to be home, the wife and kids seem terrific after the others. So you relax, have a few beers, watch an old movie on TV with the wife, go to bed. You find yourself getting a hard-on, and just as you’re about to nudge the wife, a little voice in your ear says, “Nice going, Luke. Good idea to have sex with your missus, only watch the old pulse rate. You’re lookin’ good.” It’s old Mission Control, still with me! Still there! Still watching! The hard-on naturally vanishes.
‘And Christ, they been with me ever since, watching every move and passing little palsy-walsy remarks on everything I do. I went to a Corps doctor and asked him, was it possible they’d planted some kind of device on me? Some video-radio device on me or even in me? He sent me to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist had me thrown out of the Corps.’
Felix of the tinted glasses told the woman in black fur one last joke as they left. Tired of slumming. Tinted glass, tinted glass.
‘I thought when I left the Corps it would all stop. But no, not a chance: once they get you, they get you for life. Every time I so much as farted, Mission Control would tell me what a great idea it was to vent that gas buildup.
‘Well naturally that wrecked my happy marriage. What kind of wife can put up with that, her husband gets ready to make love and then suddenly says “Affirmative, Mission Control” and gets a tired cock? And the kids, too, I’d be reading them a bedtime story when Mission Control would come on the line, asking was I sure I read that last paragraph right, and would I say again?’
Again Roderick said to himself, tinted glass, through a glass darkly but then face to long empty face – of course, it was the gold-haired stranger! Of course with the hair dyed, a different pair of tinted glasses – but no disguising the empty grin, the long empty face that, once the pocks were puttied up, had nothing in it.
‘Excuse me,’ said Roderick to the bartender. ‘That couple who just left, woman in fur, man in tinted glasses? Do you know them? Know where they went?’
‘Nope. Why.’
Roderick ran to the door and out on the corner. There were empty streets stretching away in four directions, no human to be seen, nothing but a wind-blown page of newspaper.
Roderick went back to the bar. ‘Thought I saw someone I knew … probably wrong. Go on. About your voices.’
‘Go on? They go on, pal. They go on.’
‘And they’re still with you, right now?’
‘Affirmative. Saying it’s a good story but nobody’d believe it and that I’ve had enough ethanol. Time to leave.’
‘A little voice in your ear,’ Roderick said. ‘Sounds kind of like a conscience.’
‘It is a conscience. Correct and confirmed, it is a damned conscience. That’s why I keep messing around with religion and politics. I need to find some way to get rid of this conscience. To exorcize it. I mean hell, millions of people get along without consciences, why should I get stuck? I mean Nixon did what he wanted to, right? So why me? Why me?’
Roderick knew no answer. Which was unfortunate, because Luke was getting loud and defiant.
‘I won’t put up with it!’ he yelled. ‘You hear that, Mission Control? I won’t put up with it! I’ll find some kind of religion that will shut your still small trap for good! Or politics – I’ll start a goddamned revolution that will burn Houston to the ground!’
The bartender approached. ‘Get your friend outa here. Maybe we ain’t a high-class joint, but we got our limit. He controls himself now, or out.’
‘Over and out,’ murmured Luke, as Roderick helped him from the bar. ‘Your friend doesn’t control himself, Rickwood, because they control him. He’s not even human, just a radio-controlled model astronaut. Mission Control says I’m not walking too straight. Am I?’
‘That depends on where you want to go.’
‘Gert’s Café, where else? The address is on this.’ Luke fumbled in all his pockets and came up with a handbill printed in red:
WE SAY NO
NO to Fascist prison atrocities, extermination of dissidents and tortured confessions!
NO to Marxist-Leninist mindless bureaucracies grinding down the disaffected in slave labour camps!
NO to Capitalist corporate corruption, conglomera
te exploitation of the workers and rape of the Third World!
NO to Maoist robotocracy, smashing individualism under mind-bending, brain-washing statism!
NO to the so-called New Left and other effete dilettante so-called movements drowning in their own so-called rhetoric!
NO to Anarchism, Trotskyism, Democracy and all other useless isms and ocracies!
Left Right and Centre, it’s all
A GREAT BIG NOTHING!!!
Find out the truth tonight: Mammoth meeting of the
FRACTIOUS DISENGAGEMENTISTS
(Gert’s Café Branch)
Gert’s Café
1141 Richelieu Ave. So.
Well and why shouldn’t 1141 Richelieu Ave. So. turn out to be an ordinary frame house in a slightly rundown neighbourhood? Why shouldn’t it be allowed to have a small sign on the front lawn: GERTS CAFE. KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU, and why shouldn’t this make Roderick hesitate?
‘Maybe we shouldn’t go in,’ he said, at which Luke laughed.
‘You don’t know much about politics, Rickwood.’ The question which cries out for an answer now is, who does know anything about politics? Isn’t it just a dirty game for cynical manipulators of mass ignorance?
They walked in, by direct action demanding to be let in and given the same rights as anyone else – as those who could not read, for example.
Gert’s Café provided only four tables, but then there were only three Fractious Disengagementists in the Gert’s Café Branch, which was also so far the only branch of this new regrouping of committed elements of radical consciousness in anticipation of a totally new unfettered mass spiritual/ political movement unifying to force a final showdown with the present-day corrupt and powerful system. Anyway Bill was playing the video game machine in the corner all evening, so didn’t need a chair.
So far Gert’s Café had a menu but no manifesto, but tonight’s meeting would hopefully fix that. The menu had taken careful planning and much meaningful discussion, working through all objections to California grapes and Brazilian coffee and any other foodstuff outputted by any other oppressive regime. It was finally agreed to limit the menu to bread and water – homebaked stoneground wholemeal bread and pure bottled mineral spring water – the fare of all political prisoners everywhere.
